Dick Jokes For Women: Lionel Tiger tells you why he doesn’t like The Vagina Monologues, and why you shouldn’t either. New York Press

“We will never bring back the dodo”: cloning extinct species probably won’t work, informed scientist discerns. BBC [via Robot Wisdom]

Several fascinating tidbits in the latest issue of New Scientist:

Learning fast. Within one animal generation, prey animals learn to be wary again of predators such as bear and wolves after the predators have been reintroduced into a habitat. This should have policy implications in the debates about reintroduction. It is still not clear how the prey animnals learn about the predators. For example, this fascinating fact. while wolves are silent and stealthy while hunting moose, mother moose who have lost calves to wolf predation become hypervigilant to wolf howls they have never heard in conjunction with a hunt. New Scientist

Push-button pleasure: Malpositioned electrode being implanted in a pain patient’s spinal cord induced an orgasm, and gave the surgeon the inspiration to patent a push-button orgasmotron. He’s quick to add that the device will be programmed to limit its use… but how much? New Scientist

Name that tune: “Sing a half-forgotten song to your computer
and it will name it, thanks to new software.” New Scientist

Momentous magnetism. The ability to more accurately measure the magnetic moment of a subatomic particle called the muon reveals a discrepancy of several parts in a billion from the value predicted by current theoretical physics (the “Standard Model”) , and a theory falls. Explaining this requires more than the six quarks, six leptons and twelve bosons of the Standard Model and may require positing a slew of new particles, such as those predicted by an alternate theory called supersymmetry. New Scientist

Darth Rumsfeld: Is Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense the Bush cabinet appointment progressive activists should’ve been spending their time organizing against? The press has largely welcomed his reentry to the executive branch as an eminence grise, but both his defense policy and his politicking are chilling to some analysts. And if they were bad for us in the ’70’s, they’re even worse for us in the ’00’s.

…(I)f history is any
indicator, there’s likely to be some friction between Rumsfeld and the new secretary of state, Colin
Powell. During the Ford administration, Rumsfeld masterfully neutralized many political and
policy rivals, creating a national-security advisory chain that ran from himself to Cheney to Ford,
with the once-mighty Kissinger cut down to size.

For George W. Bush, an administration without Colin Powell was unthinkable. But Powell is
viewed with suspicion by many on the right, over everything from Iraq policy to missile defense.
He has an appeal and a constituency broader than either Bush’s or Cheney’s. “On both
counts–politics and policy–Powell scares them a little,” says a senior Republican operative close
to the Bush White House. “They wanted someone committed to missile defense and who can go
toe-to-toe with Powell,” who is not known to be an enthusiastic supporter of an expansive NMD
program. The American Prospect

Nimble fingers: “Modern man may have out-competed his
Neanderthal cousins by having a finer touch, according to studies of ancient hand
fossils.

The research shows that while Neanderthals’ hands were good
for banging flints with rocks, early humans possessed hands
more adept at using handled instruments like hammers.” New Scientist

A game called suicide. “Teacher and author Jane Katch talks about the value — and
necessity — of violent play.” Salon

Why are girls growing up so fast? “According to scientists who have been investigating the case,
the biological effect of oestrogens… lurking in the
environment may well be the reason why (girls) in
industrialised countries of the West are going into puberty at
an increasingly early age. But other researchers reject the
notion, and say that better nutrition and obesity are to blame.
Still more researchers suggest the declining age of sexual
maturity is the result of having a cold and distant father, or a
stepfather, or a depressed mother. A stressful home has also
been blamed, and so too has lack of adolescent exercise, as
well as child abuse, stress and media images.” Independent

Fight to show the ‘true’ Jacqueline du Pre . I just saw the riveting Hilary and Jackie the other night, based on Hilary du Pre’s memoir of her sister Jacqueline, passionate prodigy cellist who was stricken with multiple sclerosis at the height of her career. Friends of the musician felt she did not fare too well in the film’s portrayal as a spoiled prima donna, but I thought it was more an attempt to show her intensely ambivalent and tortured relationship to her talent and the unreality of the celebrity status it brought her. Emily Watson’s superb performance as Jacqueline, the absorbing complexity of the relationship of the two sisters, and not the least the sumptuousness of the music throughout the film make it quite rewarding. Now her admirers hope to correct what they call the distortions of the portrayal with a new documentary The Real Jacqueline du Pre. I look forward to its availability in the U.S., but far more important will be setting out to collect some du Pre on CD tomorrow… Sydney Morning Herald

Dan Hartung, in today’s Lake Effect posting, muses: “Okay, today’s White House gunman lived on Tyler Ave.
near the corner of Tippecanoe Dr., with Tecumseh Lane
nearby. Tippecanoe, of course, was the nickname of
William Henry “Tippecanoe” Harrison, who fought a battle
with Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh…” Dan and I wonder if this has anything to do with Tecumseh’s Curse, about which I wrote here some time ago. Recall that this relates to the death in office of the U.S. President elected every twentieth year since Harrison in 1840, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan.

‘After a day of listening to Washington pundits praise the 90-year-old
Ronald Reagan as a “hero” — a verdict delivered with no discernible
dissent — we have decided to repost three past articles about the 40th
U.S. president: his real deeds and his real legacy.’ Consortium News And in Rehearsals for a Lead Role, the Washington Post writer proclaims that “Ronald Reagan was a liberal, an actor, a labor chief — but some unscripted plot twists forged a new character.”

Still, there persists the caricature of Reagan as a B-movie actor who used the talents he honed on soundstages in Burbank to attain high office where he stumbled into the end of the Cold War. Even his conservative supporters have perpetuated this view. Reagan national security adviser Robert McFarlane once remarked, “He knows so little and accomplishes so much.”

But a close review of the historical record, and recent interviews with those who knew Reagan best during the 1940s and ’50s, show a man profoundly affected by his experiences as a movie star and six-term president of the Screen Actors Guild. He emerges as a complex individual who — through what he once described as intense “philosophical combat” — changed his political ideology. Contrary to assertions (which Reagan himself often encouraged) that he became a Republican because the Democratic Party abandoned him, Reagan actually went from being a staunch liberal who participated in Communist front groups to a stalwart anti-communist because of his firsthand experiences dealing with Communist Party members. Washington Post